Tag: copyright
AI and the corporate capture of knowledge
"A society cannot meaningfully debate policy, science or justice if information is locked away behind paywalls or controlled by proprietary algorithms. If we allow AI companies to profit from mass appropriation while claiming immunity, we are choosing a future in which access to knowledge is governed by corporate power rather than democratic values." Bruce Schneier...
What Can We Give One Another? On Public Domain, Preservation, and Living Without Copyright
Could you only consume public domain work for a year straight? With the new year coming up and various IP being released to the public domain, I thought I'd muse on copyright and the future of art and culture.
The mad king’s digital killswitch
"The very worst-case speculative scenario for Huawei-as-Chinese-Trojan-horse is infinitely better than the non-speculative, real ways in which the US has killswitched and bugged the world's devices." Cory Doctorow explains why responsible governments should have to accelerate their countries' independence from US tech and not just Russian gas. pluralistic.net
Taking A Mile
The risk of the open internet is that someone will exploit your well-intentioned openness thoughtlessly. That’s how the internet slowly stops being open.
Create For Yourself
With disruption hitting the media industry acutely in 2024, now is the time to lean into owning your creative work. Have a say in your creative destiny.
Floppy Copy Classics
A few copy-protection schemes, of varying levels of success, you’ve possibly run into over the years. Don’t lose your code wheel.
Trapped, Kept
If a company decides not to do anything with a beloved brand or product, does the public have any recourse? Depends on if the product is physical, honestly.
Public Domain Disney
Disney is no friend of the public domain, but in honor of the public domain finally expanding, we wanted to appreciate Walt Disney’s contributions to it.
Another Year of Tedium
The state of our Tedium in 2019 is a pivotal one if you love the idea of creating things online. Let’s talk about why—and what we can do to keep it safe.
Symbiotic Infringement
Pondering the shutdown of a YouTube user who uploaded lots of John Oliver videos over a multi-year period—and probably made John Oliver more popular.
When Copyright Goes Copywrong
The rigid nature of copyright law during the early years of the film industry created a surprisingly robust cottage industry around public domain films.
Eye Of The Tiger
Tiger Electronics' LCD-based games shouldn't have been as successful as they were against the Game Boy. But the company was anything but a failure. Why?
Purple Copyright Eater
When Prince died, he left behind a massive legacy of music. He left behind an equally massive legacy of copyright enforcement. Here's why.
The UK copyright exemption for text and data mining vs. the DMCA and EUCD
Worst. Birthday. Ever.
The traditional song \"Happy Birthday\" is definitive proof that just because a song is traditional doesn't mean it isn't copyrighted.
Bootleg This Issue
Bootlegged movies and music are fairly common online these days, but it was a guy who worked at an opera who got things going.
How to stop your images from being pinned to Pinterest
Pinterest is an interesting tool, and a lot of people I know love it. This is how it works. You maintain a set of pinboards for different kinds of images - for example, I've got pinboards for logos, app wireframes, and interesting visuals. If you visit a site that has an image you'd like to keep, or share, you click a "pin it" button in your browser, and that image is copied to one of your pinboards. Obviously, not everyone loves this. It arguably pushes the envelope of fair use, and will prob
There shouldn't need to be an OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap is a project whose aim is to make a free map of the world. It's extremely impressive: as well as searching the map in a normal way, the data is exportable via XML, PNG, JPEG, SVG and more, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. But it shouldn't need to exist. In the US, federal government-created maps (and other data) are considered to be public information, and released freely. In the UK, such maps are subject to Crown Copyright, and the Ordnance Survey has be